Instead of the rolling waves and cool breezes of the sea, this funereal region only gives out burning gusts, scorching blasts which seem to issue from the gates of hell; these are the simoon or poison-wind, as the word signifies in Arab. The camel-driver knows this formidable enemy, and so soon as he sees it looming in the horizon, he raises his hands to heaven, and implores Allah; the camels themselves seem terrified at its approach. A veil of reddish-black invades the gleaming sky, and very soon a terrible and burning wind rises, bearing clouds of fine impalpable sand, which severely irritates the eyes and throat.

Dreadful Destruction by Sand-Storms.

The camels squat down and refuse to move, and the travellers have no chance of safety except by making a rampart of the bodies of their beasts, and covering their heads so as to protect themselves against this scourge. Entire caravans have sometimes perished in these sandstorms; it was one of them that buried the army of Cambyses when it was traversing the desert.

Camp, in his charming work on the Nile, describes in the following terms one of these desert tempests. It comes towards one, he says, growing, spreading, and advancing as if on wheels. Its overhanging summit is of a brick color, its base deep red and almost black. In proportion as it approaches it drives before it burning effluvia, like the breath of a lime-kiln. Before it reaches us we are covered with its shadow. The sound it makes is like that of a wind passing through a pine-forest. So soon as we are in the midst of this hurricane the camels halt, turn their backs, throw themselves down, and lay their heads upon the sand. After the cloud of dust comes a rain of imperceptible stones, violently hurled about by the wind, and which, if it lasted long, would quickly flay the skin from those parts of the body unprotected by the clothes. This lasted five or six minutes, and was frightful. Then the sky became clear again, and gave the same feeling of sudden change to the eye as a light suddenly brought into a dark place.

Whirlwinds are generally preceded by a sultry, oppressive air; sometimes by absolute calm; but the state of the wind never appears clearly connected with the phenomena. The storm pillars vary greatly in form; the sand columns being generally funnel-shaped, and the water-spouts like a pipe surrounded at the base by whirling vapors and foaming water. The height and diameter are also variable; some of the highest have been estimated at 6,000 feet. In many cases the damage caused by the water is of such a kind as to show that there has been an influx of air from every side toward the base of the column.

BOOK II.

THE SEA.

CHAPTER I.

MONSTERS OF THE GREAT DEEP.

The Ladders of the Titans-The Watery Desert-A Great Unknown - Mysteries of the Deep-Marvelous Products-Terrible Marine Monsters-The World-Renowned "Kraken "-Battle with a Strange Foe-The Great Sea-SerpentSingular Stories-Old Sailors' Narratives - The Huge Ocean Giant-Curious Habits of the Whale-Perilous and Exciting Adventures-A Miraculous EscapeThe Flying Dragon-A Fish with Spikes-Seized by a Shark-The Stomias Boa-The Hammer-Headed Shark-The Siamese Twins of the Sea.

O behold the sea! It is the dream of every landsman, citizen or peasant, who dwells in the interior of an ocean-washed country, however little he may care for the grand scenes of nature. The mountains attract in the same manner the inhabitants of the plains, but not so strongly. He may, with some degree of effort, embody them for himself with the aid of the pictures he has seen, or the descriptions he has read. Certainly, when at a later time fortune permits him with admiring eye to view these gigantic monuments of our planet's ancient convulsions; when he sees, on the platforms which are but their first steps, the enormous masses rising, on whose flanks the vast forests appear like patches of moss, and which are in their turn surmounted by piles of rocks with summits apparently piercing the celestial vault, he discovers but a faint resemblance between their reality and the conceptions he has formed of them.

And if he undertakes to climb these ladders of the Titans; if, at an elevation of some thousands of feet, he casts his glance over the plains; if he peers down into the abysses lying open before his steps; if he marks the cascades leaping from crag to crag with a thunderous roar and burying themselves in gulfs where whiten their foamy waves; if he climbs to the wintry regions where the rocks are of ice, where the soft moss and crisp green turf are replaced by perpetual snows, where he is lost-as it were— in space, where legions of moving clouds hide the earth from his vision,

where the difficult air impedes his respiration: then he will think of the paltry landscapes below with a scorn attempered by pity.

But the mountains are still the earth. There man may live on the proceeds of the chase or of his industry. There he may build himself a house. There flourish plants and animals with which he is familiar. He marches there with a firm foot. The very dangers that threaten him—the precipice, and the torrent, and the storm, and the avalanch—are only an enlargement, so to speak, of those which everywhere surround him. In a word, he is as much at home on the mountain-peak as in his own fields; the form and aspect alone are different.

Grandeur of the World of Waters.

But it is otherwise with the ocean. He who has never seen it can form no just conception of it. Vainly does he seek a resemblance in the masterpieces of the painter's art, in the great rivers, the great lakes, the vast extent of the plains, farms, or prairies. Nothing can ever paint to him the liquid immensity. Brought face to face with ocean, he will remain speechless and stupified. And what will it be if he goes down to the deep in ships, loses sight of earth, and finds himself suspended between the water and the sky, sustained above the abyss by a few planks? Over his head, the infinite space; under his feet, a capricious and shifting element -capricious, at least, in appearance—to day, calm, benign, and motionless; to-morrow, furious and implacable, hurling one against another its foam-crested waves, longing to engulf his frail bark in their formidable embrace.

It is then that he will feel the sentiment of his own weakness growing upon him, with the idea of infinity. His temerity will at first astonish and terrify him. He will think with admiration of the forgotten hero who first dared to launch himself upon the sea in a boat, and confront the unknown; of those who, bolder still, undertook the desperate enterprise of discovering the end, the boundary of the watery desert-sailing, sailing from the other side of the world, until they should meet with the land seen by the mind's eye beyond the horizon. Then the tranquil courage of the seamen, their skilful manoeuvres, their familiarity with this great liquid world, which they both know and love; all this tends by degrees to reassure him. A certain enthusiastic pride will succeed the humble dread of his first moments; he will enjoy man's fierce struggle against the elements. If a storm break forth, he will rejoice to witness it, as a young soldier, after the first few musket shots, feels a fierce delight in the battle. And as the soldier, when once more seated by his fireside, proudly exclaims: “I was in that war; I fought on such and such a famous field;"

he too, in his turn, will cry, "I have beheld the sea; and not only from the harbor, the pier, and the summit of the cliff, but I have seen it beneath my feet; I have seen it alternately serene and stormy, agitated and asleep; I have bounded o'er the waves to the roaring of the tempest; I have struggled against it-and here I am!"

Mysteries of the Sea.

This indeed is a fortunate man, for he has seen the ocean. But has he seen it truly? No. For the ocean is not, like the mountains, an accident on the surface of the earth; it is a world, two and a half times as large as' our own, if we consider only its surface, and it envelops ours on every side. It is a world which nourishes legions of strange beings in its depths, in its vast coral forests. It is a world which man, after so many centuries, at the cost of so many sacrifices, scarcely begins to know, far from having conquered it.

Like to the great gods of the ancient barbarians of the North and the East, the ocean-a greedy and terrible power-makes us pay every year by hundreds of human lives for the favors it bestows upon us. How many has the enormous Sphinx devoured of those who have attempted to divine its enigmas, to pierce its mysteries! What matters it? The work goes on, and goes forward. The human eye has penetrated that formidable night. Science already comprehends the laws which govern the marine world and connect it with the terrestrial, and has learned the part which the seas perform.

It has done more. By a series of inductions based on an examination of the constitution of our globe, it has succeeded in ascending to the origin of things; in unlocking, so to speak, the archives of nature, and composing a history of the ocean, a history so logical, so satisfactory to the mind, so harmonious with existing facts, that we cannot refuse to accord it a very high degree of certainty.

Marvelous Products of the Ocean.

We are to study the ocean in its actual condition; its regular or tumultuous movements, the causes which produce and the laws which govern them. Exploring the shores of the seas, their surface, and abysses, we see developed the prodigious series of beings which inhabit them: fantastic plants; rudimentary animals scarcely distinguishable from plants; microscopical creatures which swarm in incalculable myriads, agitate, labor, and multiply-molluscs, crustaceans, fish, reptiles, gigantic amphibians, even birds; for among the winged race there are hundreds of species which belong to the marine not less than to the aërial world.

We show the ocean ploughed in every direction, excavated in its depths and explored by man, and exercising a powerful influence on the progress of science and civilization; less, indeed, by the immense riches which it offers to our greed, than by the obstacles which it opposes to our encroachments, and by the problems which it proposes for us to solve.

Extraordinary Marine Monster.

No forms of life on our globe are more calculated to awaken surprise than those which are found in the mysterious depths of the ocean, strange stories and descriptions of which have come to our notice. Many wondrous tales are on record of gigantic polypi, living in the polar and tropical seas; fierce and redoubtable monsters, of size and strength sufficient to overcome and devour the largest whales, and, consequently, far more easily able to destroy any unfortunate mariner who may have fallen overboard, or incautious swimmer who ventures to sport in the waters frequented by them. Accounts are given of monstrous creatures, capable of entangling ships, and of seizing with their arms not only men, but even whales of huge dimensions. Mention is made of a monster whose arms were thirty feet in length, and so thick that a man could scarcely clasp them. Mention is also made of other animals of the same kind, whose arms measured from seventy-five to one hundred and twenty feet! Finally, the celebrated "kraken," which has been the theme of so many romances, was of no less a girth in its upper portion than half a league, and would have capsized the largest vessels, had not their crews severed the arms with which it held them. The truth is, that in the Pacific Ocean a

species does exist of enormous development.

The Huge Octopus.

One of the most eminent of modern naturalists, Ehrenberg, has communicated to the Berlin Academy of Sciences some observations well deserving notice. His paper, relates to soundings made on the Greenland coast by the English ship Bull-dog. He says the accounts given strikingly accord with the old legends that tell of marine monsters living at the bottom of the sea, and enveloping with their arms all things that approached them. What Pliny says of enormous polypi thirty feet long, and weighing seven hundred pounds, has been regarded as an exaggeration. But an immense creature was captured which might be called "whale-slayer," for it was taken while engaged in a struggle with one of these giants of the sea. Some portions of the body of this gigantic polypus are preserved in the Copenhagen Museum.

We cannot, therefore, doubt that the depths of the sea, where vegeta